Hello and welcome to Chineselearn Chinese lessons. Today, I would like to teach a sentence that would be very useful if you are traveling in China or if you are in China for any reason. These sentences that I’m going to teach you today is “Where is the bathroom?” So this could be a quite useful sentence if you are in China and you have to use it sometimes. You might hesitate to say that but it can help you a lot. So how do you say “Where is the bathroom?” in Chinese? And that is “wèi shēng jiān zài nǎ lǐ”. If you don’t master the sentence at this stage, it’s fine because we are going to look at the tones and the pronunciations and the writing of this sentence. So how do you read, write and communication this sentence in Chinese. Let’s have a look at each Chinese characters.
Okay, so let’s have a look at this sentence, “wèi shēng jiān zài nǎ lǐ”. So the first three characters “wèi shēng jiān” means sanitation room and it is just one word in Chinese. And the fourth character “zai” means “at” in Chinese. And the fifth and sixth character “na li” means where. So sanitation room at where which is the Chinese grammar. And in English, “Where is the bathroom?” Which means the sanitation room. So again, in Chinese grammar, words like where, how and what is placed exactly in the same position as asking a statement and that’s exactly like saying “sanitation room at there” and you just substitute the “there” with “where”. And that’s the Chinese way of asking a question. “wèi shēng jiān zài nǎ lǐ”. Let’s have a look at each individual character.
As you can see, the first character “wei”. “Wei” is a very simple character. As long as you can write it from top to bottom, you should be fine and it’s got only these three lines which you can easily put them together. So “Wei”.
[Demonstration]
Let’s have a look at the second character “sheng”. So sheng means living. And altogether, wei sheng, protect the living. That means to do the sanitation. Sheng again is a very simple Chinese character and you can see that it’s got only five lines and the way of writing this character is from top to bottom. So wei sheng means sanitation. That’s fantastic.
Let’s look at the next character “jian”. Jian is out to in surrounded structure character. So the way of writing this character is to write the surrounding bit from the outside and then you write the component from the inside. So jian means room. It does look like a room because it’s got a door and then it’s got a person, some say inside the door. So it’s like a room. You have mastered at least three characters, wei sheng jian, which means the bathroom or the sanitation room for now.
So let’s move on to the fourth character “zai”. Zai is again a half surrounded structure character. And the way of writing this character is to write the surrounding bit from the outside and then the bit from the inside that’s being surrounded. So there are two components and you write the outer component before you write the inner one. So as long as you get it all constructed into components and put them together and they’ll recognize both, you are successful. You are fantastic in writing this character “zai”. So zai means at.
Let’s have a look at the next character “na”. So this is one of the harder to write Chinese characters. So as you can see, na is separated into three bits. It is a left, middle and a right structure. So the way of writing this character is to write the left bit and then the middle component and then the right component, and then put them together into a left, middle, right structure so you are successful in writing this character.
Let’s look at the last character “li”. As you can see, li is almost like up and down structure. So the way of writing this character is again from top to bottom and there is a vertical bark going through from the top component to the down component. So the way of writing this character is to write the upper component and then write the vertical bar before you complete the lower component.
So altogether, wèi shēng jiān zài nǎ lǐ.
That’s fantastic and I believe that you’ve now mastered the tones, the pronunciations and the writing of this sentence, wèi shēng jiān zài nǎ lǐ. So that’s the lesson for you today. So until next time, please feel free to subscribe to my channel and rate my lessons. And as I’ve said in many of my videos that I’m creating a course that teaches basic Chinese skills. And the main point of this course is to make Chinese exciting and easy for you to learn. So don’t feel like, “Chinese is the most difficult language in the world for you.” So to bring down the difficulties and to bring out your interest of learning Chinese and also to teach you some basic Chinese skills including online course that you can learn Chinese by yourself. That is my task here. And I hope to see all of you in my course. So until next time [Foreign Language]
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services